Thursday, November 29, 2012

...The Hall of Fame board of directors needs to establish some new guidelines. Phil Rogers is right.

A player gets one chance – one ballot. You’re in or you’re not. Period.

The Steroid Era… make a decision. Make it now.

The board will not establish new guidelines. It won’t happen. They will leave it up to the nearly 580 voters to decide on their own. This time next year, I’ll read another similar Phil Rogers’ column and feel bad for him… kind of.

The entire process sucks. That’s why the Hall of Fame sucks.

Next Summer when you’re in Cooperstown, say hi to Johnny Evers for me. Thanks.

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A player gets one chance – one ballot. You’re in or you’re not. Period.

The Steroid Era… make a decision. Make it now.

If ever the deliberate ballot made sense, it's now. You don't need ten elections to figure out if Mays or Ruth or Aaron deserve to be in, or even borderline cases with no complicating factors beyond the stat lines, but dealing with PED users is a legitimately complex issue. A one time yea-or-nay would just let the voters off easy, because there's no way in hell that Bonds, Clemens, etc. would make it.

The board will not establish new guidelines. It won’t happen. They will leave it up to the nearly 580 voters to decide on their own.

The whole point of having voters is to let them apply their own judgement, and, to a certain extent, make and modify their own guidelines to fit odd situations. Otherwise you might as well make a rule that any player with X games played, Y home runs, or Z WAR is automatically in.

I skimmed TFA, to try to figure out what the guy was trying to say about Johnny Evers, but it didn't have any more context than it does here.

Did come across this (emphasis added):

After I read Phil Rogers’ piece in the Tribune this morning, I felt compelled to write.

Phil said he plans to “re-examine” his non-vote on Lee Smith from last year. The former closer is making his 10th appearance on the ballot. What is there to re-examine? Have his numbers changed? Did he pitch last season and therefore help or hurt his chances of making the Hall?

Phil isn’t the only guy that does this – he’s the only baseball writer that has a ballot that I read on a regular basis.

Huh.

Luckily, executive producers for local radio sports shows don't get Hall of Fame votes.

I used to live in AR while serving as a history professor, and the billboards for the Clinton Presidential Museum said "History Doesn't Change, but Our Displays Do." I always resented that sign. History changes all the time, as we gain access to more information about the past and better ways of evaluating the past, and as we recognize the blind spots in our past efforts to gather and evaluate information.

The Hall of Fame is at its core an historical institution and the ballot an historical endeavor to evaluate players relative to both the context of the era in which they played, and relative to the entire historical arc of the game. Treating voting as a one-off thing would be the same as declaring "All right, we have completed the work of evaluating Abraham Lincoln. No one is allowed to research or write about him any more, it's time to move on to Andrew Johnson."

reating voting as a one-off thing would be the same as declaring "All right, we have completed the work of evaluating Abraham Lincoln. No one is allowed to research or write about him any more, it's time to move on to Andrew Johnson."

Does Bill James's New Historical Abstract include Negro Leaguers, at least in its top-ten or top-twenty lists? If so, it would be good; it would have most of the current HOF.

Yes + no. They're sprinkled through the top 100, but not the positional lists. It's also no longer very new (over a decade old?). I think I'm just generally surprised that the web isn't crawling with definitive top 5000 lists.

You could make a decent allegory to the white gentry sucking the life-blood out of the slave population, but if you want to stick with traditional tropes, you'd go pre-Romero zombie lit, which is 100% about the loss of bodily agency and becoming a slave.

You could make a decent allegory to the white gentry sucking the life-blood out of the slave population, but if you want to stick with traditional tropes, you'd go pre-Romero zombie lit, which is 100% about the loss of bodily agency and becoming a slave.

There was a Lincoln vs. zombies film as well, though it was a low-budget direct to DVD affair designed to take advantage of/trick people into thinking it was the major film.

I knew my forthcoming book of academic history would be getting more and better press, if only the good people at Indiana U. Press had let me add orphan-eating cyborgs to my story of poverty in the Gilded Age....

Seriously, though, what do people recommend for a place to start in the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sort of fiction? What's the name of the Lincoln Vampire book?

Well, something tells me that it's not going to be the Lincoln film people remember 20 years from now.

Though. "I am the president, clothed with immense power" is, in it's own way, cornier than anything in Abraham Licoln, Vampire Hunter (even though, as I understand it, the line is based on something he actually said).